In Detail - Jewels

Yello! And welcome to another day where I write about writing the songs on the album Fever Dreamer. Today I’m going to talk about the sixth track on the album called Jewels

This was one of those times where I didn’t have an idea for a song sitting down at the desk one night. I just had a hankerin’ to mess around. So I started messing around with alternate tunings on the guitar, and plugged my mic in with my at-this-point signature vocal chain (the spaced out one I used on almost all songs on the album) and just started messing about.

The main guitar riff for this song literally plays the same dang thing throughout the track’s entirety and was relatively easy to play while spit balling some vocal treatments in real time. On this ruff cut, you can hear my guitar strings through the vocal mic as I’m recording it all live, so you get some cool jittery delays from the strings layered on top of that actual guitar input sound. I had also done a long but relatively quick pass on lyrical structure. I wasn’t certain at this point on keeping the lyrics (which I ultimately did) but having written words on a page makes layering vocal ideas easier.

From there, it was just a matter of setting everything up from scratch and playing through to a gentle click track to keep things on tempo, and then marking within the Pro Tools session where in the track the more instrumental and loud portions come in versus the softer verse’s with the vocal treatments layered in there.

Honestly, there’s very little to say about the production of Jewels because, in the grand scheme of things, it was one of the easiest tracks to produce for the album. It fell together with minimal resistance. Almost every layer I added along the way just… worked, so there wasn’t much editing down or scratching my head. It wrote itself in a matter of less than a week and when that week was over, I had no thoughts that it ever really needed any more work. All the way down to the random strings noises at the very end. So much of it just fell into place in my multiple recording passes, it all stayed in there, and I moved on. After many tracks where I had to beat the song into the ground to complete it, Jewels was a DREAM.

Here’s the final product from the album:

Lyrics:Jewels of carnage sparkle brightlyNeverending twist of lightningFighting for the ways foretoldWhile searching for piles of goldFaded fight but finding nothingNothing matters more than nowThe time that’s spent is lost somehowAs it withers awayWith forces missed and astrayMixed and scratched but never lostThe itch it swells from front to backAlways morphing from attractionCranium rocks will feastA modest lack of beastA modest lack of roasted beast